“This is all to say that Paul Graham is an effective marketer and practitioner, but a profoundly unserious public intellectual. His attempts to grapple with the major issues of the present, especially as they intersect with his personal legacy, are so mired in intuition and incuriosity that they’re at best a distraction, and worst a real obstacle to understanding our paths forward.”

In some of Adam Greenfield’s backpages “Whatever happened to serendipity?” he recounts how he used to scrounge for punk rock records and how the difficulty and uncertainty of the experience was part of what made it worthwhile:

When I still did photography, I read everything I could find about how cameras work and this is the mental model I built up back then.